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Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Tag Archives: voice

Russian Post-Turntable Turntablism (MP3s)

[ January 8, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The Dusted Wax netlabel continues its forays into post-turntable turntablism with Mizontiq‘s A Room Without Mirrors. The album, coming in at 14 tracks, ranges widely, from downtempo lounge to spaced-out jams. There are two certain highlights: “Vocain” takes an Eartha Kitt–ish wail and turns it into something akin to a muted Jimi Hendrix solo, filtered amid blissfully detuned drums and a fuzzed-out bass solo (MP3). “The Walls Have Ears” seems, like “Vociain,” to take a pre-existing soul track as its source material, and then proceeds to break up the drums and muffle the vocal, heightening the reverberations while desiccating the original (MP3); if Serge Gainsbourg had been Om Records’ house producer, it might have sounded like this.

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Get the full set at dustedwax.org. More on Mizontiq, who’s based in Russia (where exactly is unclear), at his soundcloud.com/mizontiq page.

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Instagr/am/bient: 25 Sonic Postcards

25 ambient musicians respond to one another’s evocative Instagram photos.

[ December 28, 2011 / Department: projects / Comments: 34 ]

25 ambient musicians created original sonic postcards in response to one another’s evocative Instagram photos.

An Introduction to Instagr/am/bient:

Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?

Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards. They are pieces of music whose relative brevity—all are between one and three minutes in length—is designed to correlate with the economical, ephemeral nature of an Instagram photo.

The result of the 25 musicians’ collective efforts is an investigation into the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and artistic process. What parallels exist, for example, between the visual filters that Instagram provides users to transform their photos and the sound-processing tools employed by electronic musicians?

In many cases here, the musicians employ sonic field recordings as source material for their music. In the case of both their photos and their compositions (photography in one case, phonography in the other), documents are altered to emphasize their atmospheric qualities: to eke a modest art out of the everyday.

Thumbnails of the 25 Images:

The full collection is also streaming at soundcloud.com/disquiet.

The 25 MP3s are downloadable for free individually and as a Zip file at archive.org.

Download a 58-page PDF with full-page reproductions of the images and additional information on all the participating musicians: PDF.

A Disquiet.com Project
Commissioned by Marc Weidenbaum

Design/Boondesign.com
Cover Photo/Brian Scott

This project in no way intends to imply any formal association with Instagram.

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The Psychic Ambience of the Holidays (MP3)

[ December 18, 2011 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The polar extremes of the holiday season are remarkable for their seeming incongruity, perhaps most notably in terms of psychic ambience: on the one hand, a manic consumerism; on the other, a sense of reflection and hushed anticipation. Guy Birkin ponders the latter by taking existing seasonal recordings, a pair of them, and forming from them something new, something singular.

Both of his chosen source documents are explicitly seasonal. There’s a church choir and there’s a brass band. The congregation sings “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and the band plays “Once in Royal David’s City.” The choir is accompanied by a pipe organ. The brass band, on the other hand, is accompanied by various externalities: that recording was made from a distance and is infused with everyday noise. The resulting work, which Birkin titled “Christmas Ambience,” is very much an extended take on the latter approach to sound, in which context seems to submerge text, yet where the result is an aura with more meaning, more feeling, than the text might have ever had on its lonesome. It’s a slow, solemn piece, yet it seems to glisten in its seeming stasis:

Bikrin also provided some explanation for how he accomplished his piece:

The recordings were pitch-shifted and stretched with FFT, then layered together and the process repeated. The original version of this track was over 18 minutes long, but the most interesting section was its beginning in which the choral and brass sounds are barely audible above the background noise. It took quite a lot of work to simplify the track and concentrate only on the most ambiguous sounds.

Track originally posted for free streaming and download at soundcloud.com/notl. More on Birkin at twitter.com/guybirkin and aestheticcomplexity.wordpress.com.

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Revealing the Glitch in Voice (MP3)

[ December 15, 2011 / Department: downstream / Comment: 1 ]

By all appearances, the musician who goes by All N4tural is the only one on the Soundcloud.com audio-hosting service who applies the tag “colliding banter” to his recordings. This is unfortunate, because the resulting work is deserving not just of a listen, but of emulation.

The “colliding banter” material uses spoken words — not “spoken word” as in poetry,” but “spoken words” as in “spoken words,” i.e. human speech captured in its colloquial form — for source material in the pursuit of a glitchy funky music. Though a given track has no semblance of the shape of a song, the presence of bits of human speech amid a kind of rough tunefulness lend it the feeling of a song. Fans of Scott Johnson, Steve Reich, and John Oswald will likely appreciate the sonic machinations. Here, for example, is “They Was Utterly Helpless”:

The term “glitch” is applied here purposefully. Not because the music, with its naked brokenness, has the fast data-processed cut’n'paste feel of music often described as glitch — though, of course, it does — but because glitch at its core is about error, and the work All N4tural applies to the human voice celebrates all the inaccuracies and unintended accentuations of speech.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/all-n4tural. His music has been covered here frequently in the past.

The image shown here is a detail of the photo that the track took as its “cover”; it’s from flickr.com.

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The Sonic Properties of Urban Protest, Bangkok Edition (MP3)

[ December 8, 2011 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The Triple Canopy site has just concluded its six-episode podcast on the sound of Bangkok. It’s a narrated study of the rhythms and noise, the speech patterns and technology, that define the political sensibility of urban Thailand (MP3). Car horns and megaphones, street-corner Ancient Mariners and thousands-deep crowds, are heard as Ben Tausig, the podcast’s creator, discusses the ongoing governmental transformation of the country, and how those infrastructural transitions play out in the street.

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The timing of the podcast, which appeared on the Triple Canopy website at the end of November, clearly aligns well with the rise of the “Occupy” movement, but the correlation isn’t merely a useful coincidence. One needn’t listen too carefully to hear the cry of “We are the 99%” amid the beeping horns and half-broken amplification equipment that comprise much of the podcast.

If any moment stands out from the rest of the excellent episode in a decidedly strong series on the sonics of urbanism, it’s when, toward the end of the recording, that increasingly prominent English-language battle cry is heard to suddenly end, mid-syllable. It’s unclear what has happened: was the speaker unsure of the wording, was a threat sensed in the immediate vicinity, was the recording equipment quickly shut off? The episode is as much about the tenor of protest as it is about the message, but at that moment, the two matters — texture and text — collide in one deeply ambiguous occurrence.

More on the episode at canopycanopycanopy.com. An earlier episode was covered here last year: “Sound, Class, and Sound Clash Over Bangkok.”

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